LESSONS IN: INNOVATION
Reinventing the wheel
Made-to-order innovation key to Fredericton entrepreneur’s commercial success
By Alec Bruce

AT FREDERICTON-BASED Smart Skin Technologies, inventive genius is a given. Still, as founder and CEO Kumaran Thillainadarajah says, “understanding what the marketplace needs is the big thing. Knowing how to tailor what you’ve created to a wide variety of needs in a wide variety of industries is the key to survival and growth.”

He should know. Since 2009, his company has, in equal measures, specialized in both innovation and commercial expansion for its proprietary Quantifeel System™ — a technology he developed as a computer-engineering student at UNB. “Essentially,” he says, “it uses nanotechnology to create a pressure- sensitive, polymer ‘skin’ that you can apply to a manufactured item.”

Originally, Thillainadarajah — an immigrant from Sri Lanka — created the product for the medical community, specifically for prosthetic design. In short order, though, he divined the broader applications of his invention. “I guess in the first couple of years, we were just building the core technologies,” he says. “Pretty soon, we realized that we were at the edge of a brand new paradigm shift in manufacturing, in production.”

Still, to commercialize that “shift” he had to explain it.

The pitch went a little like this: You are a beer or pop bottling plant. You run production lines every day and every night. You lose, maybe, 10 per cent of your product to the factory floor (the result of poorly calibrated assembly systems that just adore scratching or smashing your containers to their robotic hearts’ delight). That might cost you a million bucks a year.

Now, imagine, not throwing your money down the literal drain. Imagine, for example, fitting one of your bottles or cans or plastic containers in every production line with a very cool, pressure-sensitive film, linked to a computer, that would tell you exactly what tolerances each unit could handle before any damage results. Would that, dear potential customer, interest you?

It certainly interested New Brunswick serial angel investor Gerry Pond, the former CEO of NBTel and president of the successor organization, Aliant Telecom. In a 2014 interview with the Financial Post, Pond — who was an early-stage investor in Smart Skin and is now its board chairman — likened the company’s commercial potential to two other homespun, New Brunswick tech companies (Radian6 and Q1 Labs) in which he had pulled an equity stake and subsequently saw spun off to international buyers for a combined total exceeding $300 million. “Smart Skin has the potential to be of that scale,” he said. “I think they’re on a trajectory equal to those companies. . . (It is) a great Canadian innovation story.”

For his part, Thillainadarajah is content to build his company’s brand and broad customer appeal. Continuous production innovation is key, but so is assiduous attention to the needs of an almost limitless global marketplace. “There are, quite literally, thousands of applications for our technology,” he says. “We have to explore what these are, get the message out into the marketplace, and then expand our product lines to meet the demand that we discover.”

At the moment, this entails keeping the 15 people he employs in Fredericton (12 of whom are engineers) productively engaged in development and commercialization across the entire spectrum of manufacturing and production. It also involves commissioning the best international sales team he can muster to spread the word about Smart Skin’s capabilities.

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